Died of Assimilation

The first language ever written down, in cuneiform on clay, it outlived its own speakers by two thousand years — a dead tongue of priests and scribes long after Akkadian replaced it.

The first civilization on Earth — Mesopotamia's city-states of Uruk and Ur, inventors of cuneiform — absorbed so thoroughly its own language became a relic of scholars.

Europe's first great civilization, of bull-leapers and the labyrinthine palace of Knossos on Crete, weakened by the eruption of Thera and absorbed by the Mycenaean Greeks who told its myths.

The Etruscan god of wells and the deep sea, the Greek Poseidon's counterpart, his trident handed over to Neptune as his own name slipped beneath the water.

The Etruscan sky-king who hurled three kinds of thunderbolt, absorbed so completely into Jupiter that he kept no name of his own.

The shape-shifting chief god of the Etruscan league, worshipped at the Fanum Voltumnae sanctuary near Volsinii until Rome absorbed Etruria and folded him into its own god Vertumnus.

The civilization that taught early Rome its arches and gods, then was swallowed by the city it had tutored.

The non-Indo-European voice of pre-Roman Italy, surviving in some 13,000 inscriptions but still half-unread, drowned out by the Latin of the empire it helped to shape.

The language of the Samnites, a Sabellic cousin of Latin: Vesuvius buried Pompeii and, in the same ash, sealed the last graffiti anyone ever scratched in Oscan.

The first great steppe empire, which trapped a Han emperor for seven days and forced China to buy peace with silk and princess-brides. Han offensives and an internal split broke it; the southern half was absorbed and the rest driven west into the dark.

The cuneiform lingua franca of the ancient Near East for two millennia, the tongue of the Epic of Gilgamesh, finally elbowed aside by Aramaic and left to the scribes.

Tyre and Carthage's king-god who died and rose each spring, later mistaken for Heracles and then forgotten entirely.

Carthage's chief goddess and consort of Baal Hammon, her sign still scratched on Punic stelae long after Rome razed her city in 146 BCE.

Phoenician goddess of love and war whose evening star — the planet Venus — outshone empires; condemned in Hebrew scripture as Ashtoreth, until the cult of Mary inherited her light.

Sidon's healer-god, the Phoenician Asclepius, who castrated himself to flee a goddess and was reborn as her divine warmth.

The only East Germanic tongue left to us in writing, preserved in Bishop Wulfila's silver-lettered Bible, the Codex Argenteus, while its speakers melted into the nations of Europe.

An Indo-European language stranded in the Tarim Basin at the edge of China, whose Western words on Silk Road manuscripts startled the scholars who found them — until Turkic Uyghur settlers displaced it.

The lingua franca of the Silk Road, carried by the merchants of Samarkand and Bukhara from China to Byzantium for the better part of a thousand years. Persian and Turkic replaced it after the Arab conquest, and by about 1025 it had stopped being spoken.

It left no text of its own — only the names of hills and rivers like Carlisle and Penrith, and the yan tan tethera sheep-counting numbers still chanted in Cumbria nine centuries after the language fell silent.

The first of the great West African gold empires, grown rich on taxing the trans-Saharan trade from its capital at Koumbi Saleh. Absorbed into the rising Mali Empire by about 1240, when Sundiata Keita's forces took the capital.

The everyday Romance speech of al-Andalus, Muslim Spain — Latin's child, written in Arabic letters, surviving best in the kharjas, the little Romance refrains tacked onto Arabic love poems. Caught between Arabic and the Castilian of the conquerors, it was gone by about 1300.

The largest contiguous empire that has ever existed, built by Genghis Khan from 1206. It grew faster than it could be governed, and that is what killed it.

The largest Andean kingdom before the Inca, ruling the north coast of Peru from Chan Chan, the biggest mud-brick city in the Americas. The Inca conquered it around 1470, captured its ruler Minchançaman, and absorbed its goldsmiths. At Huanchaquito-Las Llamas the Chimú left the largest known mass child sacrifice in the Americas — 137 children.

The written language of the Christian Nubian kingdoms of the middle Nile — Makuria above all — for seven hundred years, set down in a Coptic-derived alphabet and recovered largely from the dry mound of Qasr Ibrim. The kingdoms fell to Islam and Arabic, and the last dated document in the language is from 1484. After that, silence.

Neolithic islanders who had lived in the Canaries for over a thousand years with no iron or boats; under Mencey Bencomo they annihilated a Spanish army at the First Battle of Acentejo in 1494 — 'La Matanza' — before Castile conquered, enslaved and assimilated them between 1402 and 1496.

The Slavic language of the Jews of medieval Bohemia — essentially Old Czech written in Hebrew letters, even stamped on coins. It died when Yiddish-speaking Jews moved east and the local community switched tongues, leaving only glosses — dozens marked 'in the language of Canaan' in the rabbinic compendium Or Zarua — and a handful of inscribed coins.

A Hindu-Buddhist sea power founded in 1293 that claimed 98 tributaries from Sumatra to New Guinea at its mid-14th-century peak under Hayam Wuruk and Gajah Mada. Civil war and Islamic coastal sultanates hollowed it out, and its capital fell to Demak around 1527.

The language of the Jin dynasty that ruled northern China, given its own script by imperial order in 1119. Within five centuries it had evolved into Manchu and lost its name, when Hong Taiji renamed the people in 1635; the last inscription dates to 1526.

The only West Baltic tongue that ever reached writing — conquered by the Teutonic Knights, then printed its own catechism in Königsberg so its speakers could be converted away from it.

The westernmost Slavic tongue died with Emerentz Schultze on the lower Elbe in 1756; its words survive only in lists made by outsiders who could see the end coming.

A Basque company held a royal monopoly on Venezuela's cacao for half a century, ran its own coast guard against smugglers, and fixed prices low enough that in 1749 the planter Juan Francisco de León marched on Caracas to demand its expulsion. Bourbon free-trade reform dissolved it into the Royal Company of the Philippines, and it was forgotten.

A pocket of the Gothic tongue that survived in Crimea a thousand years after Gothic died everywhere else, known from about 80 words the diplomat Busbecq wrote down in the 1560s.

Chartered by Elizabeth I in 1592, for 233 years it ran England's trade — and its diplomacy — inside the Ottoman Empire, paying its own ambassadors. Free trade made its monopoly pointless, and Parliament dissolved it in 1825.

A Hindu-Cham maritime kingdom that held the central Vietnamese coast for over a thousand years. The Vietnamese ground it down south by south until the fall of Vijaya in 1471 and the final annexation in 1832 left nothing of the state.

Denmark's third and last attempt at the Asia trade, run from Copenhagen for a century around its Tranquebar colony in India. It lost its monopoly in 1772, faded as British power rose, and was wound up in 1843.

The Norse of Orkney and Shetland outlived the Vikings by seven centuries, then fell silent around 1850 in the mouth of Walter Sutherland, a fisherman on Unst, Britain's northernmost isle.

Chartered in 1600, this private corporation ruled some 200 million people and fielded an army of 260,000 — twice the size of Britain's. Then in 1874 the government it served took it over.

Its last speaker, Tuone Udaina, was not even fluent — and he died in 1898 when a road-builder's explosion went off near where he stood, deaf, unable to hear the warning.

Planted by Norman settlers in 1169, it held a corner of Wexford for seven centuries, then dissolved into ordinary Irish English within a generation of the Famine — Edmund Hore, one of the last speakers, died in 1897.

The tongue of a people who kept a covenant of peace. After the 1835 invasion of their islands killed or enslaved them, the language faded with the survivors; its last fluent speaker, Hirawanu Tapu, died around 1900. The people endure and are learning it again.

Fidelia Fielding, last speaker of this Eastern Algonquian language of Connecticut, filled four diaries with sounds no one else could still hear by her death in 1908; the notebooks are now the only way back in.

A language related to no other on earth, written down from its last two speakers in 1930s Louisiana by the linguist Morris Swadesh, and silent since 1940.

A company with its own flag, police, stamps, and money that governed Manica and Sofala — a slab of central Mozambique the size of a small country — on behalf of mostly foreign shareholders. Its fifty-year lease ran out in 1942, when Salazar's government declined to renew it and simply handed the territory back to Portugal.

Epidemics and war drove it into one man's memory; Sesostrie Youchigant handed it to the linguist Mary Haas in the 1940s, and then it was gone.

An isolate with a grammar reserved for the voices of cannibals in its winter tales — and, after its last fluent speaker Nancy Raven died in 1957, no one left to tell them.

An Ethiopian Semitic tongue whose speakers were shamed into silence. When the linguist Wolf Leslau came looking in 1947 he found only four old people who would still speak it; within a generation it was gone, swallowed by Amharic.

Cecil Rhodes's company conquered a territory larger than France in the Matabele Wars, named it Rhodesia after him, and governed it with its own army and flag. It lost the right to rule in 1923, lived on as a holder of mineral royalties, and was finally merged out of existence in 1965.

Mbabaram's word for dog was dug, near-identical to English by pure coincidence — a standing reminder that two tongues can match without sharing a single ancestor. Its last fluent speaker, Albert Bennett, died in 1972.

A click language of the Angolan desert — the only Angolan branch of its family, spoken by a few dozen herders and fishermen called the Kwepe. They shifted to the Bantu language Kuvale, and by 1981 no fluent speakers could be found.

The southernmost Samoyedic tongue, presumed dead for years until one woman in a Siberian village — Klavdiya Plotnikova — was found still speaking it; she died in 1989.

Six hundred speakers in 1908, two by 1974, then none — a Cushitic tongue of central Tanzania that emptied out within a single lifetime.

Laura Fish Somersal told a linguist everything she remembered, then died in 1990 knowing no one was left to answer back.

It had around 80 consonants and barely two vowels — one of the most intricate sound systems ever spoken. The last man who held it, Tevfik Esenç, died in a Turkish village in 1992.

A democracy carved from the Habsburg wreckage in 1918, betrayed at Munich, occupied by two empires, and finally split in peace by the Velvet Divorce of 1992.

For most of two centuries this holding company controlled around a third of the Belgian economy and much of the Congo's wealth — 'a state within the state.' Carlo De Benedetti's 1988 raid handed control to the French group Suez, which sold it off in pieces, and in 2003 the name was switched off.

The last fragment of Yugoslavia — the Federal Republic that fought the 1990s breakup wars under Slobodan Milošević, took 78 days of NATO bombing over Kosovo in 1999, then clung on as a state union. In 2006 Montenegro voted to leave by the narrowest of margins, 55.5%, and the name Yugoslavia went out of the world with it.

An 85-year-old investment bank that ran on borrowed money and subprime mortgages, sold to JPMorgan Chase for $2 a share with Federal Reserve backing in a single weekend of March 2008.

When Marie Smith Jones died in 2008, a language spoken for centuries on Alaska's Copper River delta went silent inside a single human being.

A six-island Caribbean country created in 1954, split across two island groups 800 km apart and held together inside the Dutch kingdom. The islands never much wanted the shared government, and on 10 October 2010 it was abolished — two became countries, three became Dutch towns.

When Hazel Sampson died in 2014 at the age of 103, the Klallam of the Strait of Juan de Fuca lost the last person who had grown up speaking it — its first dictionary finished only two years before.

The southernmost language on Earth, from the tip of Tierra del Fuego. It gave the world 'mamihlapinatapai' and, in 2022, lost Cristina Calderón, its last fluent speaker.